I think I did my collage about
Heat too early. Several events this week have coalesced together into the thoughts that led to the creation of this week's collage.
The heat this past week was even worse, especially given the accompanying humidity. What made it seem even more wearing was that it just kept going on, day after day. And on Wednesday, smoke from fires in the Boundary Waters rolled in, and we shattered statewide records for polluted air quality.
I pulled out my arsenal of tricks to deal with everything. I stocked the freezer with frozen grapes and wet washcloths. I ran the portable air conditioners, the fan, and the HEPA air filter. I took extra showers. I retreated to air-conditioned coffee shops and went out to visit my mom.
Ants have invaded my kitchen. Since they decided to march across my kitchen counter, I didn't want to use poison and so spread diatomaceous powder up against the cracks and sprayed the surfaces with mint water. Occasionally, I would find one that had fought its way through the powder and continued blundering on in its mysterious path.
I had longstanding plans to get together with my friend, Eleanor Arnason, to travel to see a bird sanctuary in Wisconsin. The heat put paid to that idea, and so we decided to go instead to see an exhibit at the Minneapolis Area Institute of Art that is about to close on July 19:
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. I had seen this exhibit before, with Eric, but I was very willing to go again, and the collection affected me even more powerfully than last time.
I definitely felt echoes in today's political events, and in living through Metro Surge.
Eleanor and I both found the exhibit completely absorbing. We finished out the day at FIKA cafe at the American Swedish Institute, where I ordered cardamom coffee and bread pudding, and we declared our outing a complete success.
From the
Educator's Guide:
In the first half of the 20th century, Germany experienced the final years of the German Empire, World War I and a subsequent revolution, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of National Socialism (Nazism)* under Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II. Politics and social change deeply influenced the art of this time. Yet modern art in Germany didn’t simply reflect the changing times. It played an active, influential role in shaping conversations and ideas about those changes.
“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin” features more than 70 paintings and sculptures created during these turbulent decades. The Nationalgalerie made history in the 1920s when its director Ludwig Justi founded a so-called Gallery of the Living, one of the first museums of contemporary art in the world. In 1937, more than 500 artworks from this gallery were confiscated as part of the Nazi campaign against art they labeled “degenerate.” Today, the collection of 20th-century art from East and West Germany is housed at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and contemporary art is located in the Hamburger Bahnhof, both in Berlin.
The exhibition traces the visual arts in Germany over four decades. It begins with the rise of Expressionism as a reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic trends during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The exhibition then explores the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, the modern realist style of the 1920s.
And it considers the years between the world wars, when many German artists were influenced by international trends, especially abstraction. Many of the artists who openly critiqued society were silenced under the Nazi dictatorship, from 1933 to 1945. The Nazis insisted that art be consistent with their ideology of racial purity, traditional gender roles, extreme nationalism, and loyalty to Hitler. They classified many works of art as “degenerate,” “Jewish,” or “un-German.” They confiscated artworks from German museums and showcased this art in a “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, Berlin, and other cities, in part to ridicule the artists.
At this exhibit, I learned about how the Nazis, very early, turned their attention to art, declaring certain strains of artistic expression acceptable and admirable, and fiercely prosecuting anyone who dared create alternatives. Apparently, for fascism to flourish, critical voices must be destroyed at the root. It was sobering to read the plaques on the wall and learn how many of the sitters, artists, and art dealers came to dreadful ends: imprisoned, financial ruin, death by their own hand, or in the concentration camps, or at the war front.
I have been thinking about endurance.
I have done my best to hang on through this past week, through the personal discomfort. I watched the ants, going about their business, doggedly maneuvering around obstacles, and I thought about the people whose stories were told in the exhibit. They, too, toiled and struggled and did their best to make their way despite impossible odds.
There were two pieces of work in the exhibit that I found particularly haunting, and I have included them in this week's collage. Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s monumental sculpture Fallen Man, created in 1915–16, depicts an elongated, thin person on its knees and elbows, with its head hanging down. Over time, due to its lack of detail and specific narrative, the work came to be recognized as a quiet but powerful message for peace.
Lehmbruck had originally intended the sculpture to be a heroic monument to military valor and titled it Dying Warrior, completing it before beginning his service as a medic in a military hospital in early 1916. Now one of the most famous sculptures of the period, it is universally interpreted as a memorial against war and a meditation on death as part of a broader cycle of destruction and resurrection.
Eventually, deeply affected by his firsthand experience of the war, Lehmbruck took his own life in March 1916.
Years after his death, in 1937, the Nazi government removed many of Lehmbruck’s works from German museums, labeling them “degenerate art.” Fallen Man would go on to become one of the most iconic sculptures associated with World War I.
The other was George Grosz's painting "Remembering." George Grosz (1893–1959) was a prominent member of the New Objectivity art movement. During the Weimar Republic, his artwork served as a sharp critique of the political and social climate of the time. As the Nazi regime rose to power, Grosz emigrated to the United States to escape fascist persecution.
In 1935, he returned briefly to Germany, just before the outbreak of World War II. During this visit, he witnessed firsthand the brutal oppression of the Nazi regime—a haunting experience that deeply affected him. Upon returning to the United States, he created a painting titled Remembering. In this work, Grosz presented a self-portrait: He crouches shivering amid the ruins of a devastated building, while ghostly visions from his premonitions loom behind him.
Years later, Grosz reflected on the emotional drive behind these images:
I could not explain exactly what was really troubling me. But after I had returned to the States, my paintings became prophetic. I was compelled by an inner warning to paint destruction and ruins; some of my paintings I called “Apocalyptic Landscapes,” though that was quite some time before the real thing took place.
Image description: background: a map of the twin cities, color coded to reflect dangerously high levels of the Air Quality Index (AQI). Upper left: text reads "Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1946. Bottom: a statue of an elongated, thin person on its knees and elbows, with its head hanging down. Above it center left an ant. Right: a decadent iced coffee and cardamom bread pudding in caramel sauce. Behind them: figure from a painting, sitting hunched over and staring bleakly into space. I like the way the ant faintly mimics the posture of "Fallen Man." And the way that the garish colors of the background are subtly echoed in the tints on George Grosz's face.
[Compare my collage from 2023
Fortitude (which is about a period when I was dealing with similar issues of heat and smoke).]
Endurance
Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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